Revision as of 01:29, 3 January 2010

Contents

General

This guide will walk you through the installation and integration of Hulu Desktop for Linux. Hulu only officially supports Ubuntu 8.04+ and Fedora 9+, but most other distros should work. This guide was written for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). It assumes that you're running as the user that as your Mythfrontend, and that you have already configured LIRC to work. Full LIRC setup is outside the scope of this article.

Please note that the guide doesn't fully integrate Hulu into your Mythfrontend--it configures it to launch Hulu Desktop from Myth and sets up LIRC.

Installation

Installation of the Hulu Desktop app itself is fairly trivial, assuming you have the necessary prerequisites. You will need Flash installed.

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Now, download the .deb for your architecture and distro from Hulu Labs. To install using the command prompt:

sudo dpkg --install filename

Gentoo

Grab the .rpm from Hulu Labs and turn it into a .tar.gz with rpm2targz. Unpack it with tar and gzip and copy the huludesktop.arch/etc/huludesktop directory to /etc (where arch is the architecture you downloaded, x86_64 or i386). For example:

LinHES

The script will take care of placing Hulu Desktop in the menu. You'll find it under Media Libray > Online Streams. Remote customize should be all you need to do.

MythFrontend

The next step allows you to launch Hulu from your Mythfrontend. We're going to edit the XML files for your theme for this. Copying XML files from /usr/share/mythtv into ~/.mythtv allows you to customize menus and prevents them from being overwritten during an upgrade.

This assumes you haven't already edited your Mythfrontend's appearance. If you have, edit your existing copy of mainmenu.xml. In my case, I wanted Hulu available on the main menu. You can add it to wherever you like, you just need to copy the right XML file and edit it.

Now, open up mainmenu.xml (or whatever file you copied over) in your favorite editor. Add the following lines where you want your Hulu button to live.

LIRC

First, open ~/.huludesktop in your favorite editor and find the lirc_remote_identifier line. Replace mceusb with your remote. If you don't know it, exit the editor and run irw. Hit a few buttons on your remote, and you'll get output similar to the following: